A Study Forecasts Double-Digit Growth of Russian Internet Until 2018

I don’t have a nostalgia of ‘pyatiletkas’. The five-year plans were favoured by USSR politicians to make forecasts and compare those with achievements of the national economies since 1928.

It seems that the ‘pyatiletkas’ are back in vogue in Russia as a new report has been with a five-year forcast of the Russian Internet economy performance. It is expected to grow at 15-20 percent until the year 2018, reports Wall Street Journal Emerging Europe.

The study, conducted by Russian Association for Electronic Communications and the Higher School of Economics estimated that in 2012 the Russian Internet industry has accounted for 1,3% of the country’s GDP as 66 million Russian are online.

In the best practices of the statistical analysis though, the scenarios include the best case – 35-40 percent growth if all goes well, and 3-6 percent growth if the country is hit by an economic crisis.

The gap between the scenarios is so high, one would think that the growth can go either way, although the analysts at Mail.Ru Group shared with WSJ that the forecast is conservative.

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Natasha Starkell

TwitterLinkedInFacebook Google+ Natasha Starkell is the founder and CEO of GoalEurope, advisory firm focusing on technology investment and software development in Russia and Eastern Europe. Prior to starting GoalEurope she has worked in the field of finance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate strategy and offshore outsourcing at Unisys Corporation in Switzerland and United Kingdom. She has an MBA degree from London Business School. She speaks Russian, English and German. She lives in Northern Germany.